The North American version of the upcoming MONARCH! double CD set, Dead Men Tell No Tales, a colossal collection of not one, but two full length albums previously released on vinyl only by the French glacial sludge / feedback / lava rock behemoth known as MONARCH!.
Hailing from the picturesque Northern Basque Country of France, MONARCH! unleash a slow motion avalanche of impossibly glacial, blackened sludge and hypnotic feedback, each song a series of epic tarpit riffage stretched out eternally over lumbering drums and the cavernous rumble of speaker cabinets. Over these yawning expanses of black void appears the demonic, throat-shredding shrieks and ghostly singing of Emilie, whose petite appearance belies one of the harshest throats in the underground doom spectrum. Beyond heavy. MONARCH!'s mega-crawling ambient doom / drone / sludge follows in the grand tradition of fellow tarpit adventurers MELVINS, CORRUPTED, NOOTHGRUSH, and BLACK SABBATH, and accompany their music with an iconoclastic design style that decorates their material with deceptively cute imagery drawing from the collective influence of Sanrio, Japanese animation, European graffiti, weirdo hardcore, and skateboard culture.
This double CD set contains both MONARCH!'s newest album Die Tonight, and the now out-of-print Speak Of The Sea LP, both released in limited vinyl editions as European imports, with additional unreleased songs exclusive to this release. The North Amercian version of Dead Men Tell No Tales is presented in an offset-printed, 4-panel case printed by Stumptown Printers, with all new original artwork in the band's unique design style.
Review
The female vocals are certainly interesting, and the genre is quite innovative, since it's some sort of mixture of funeral doom, drone and sludge. I'm not sure if that's what they were going for, but there's a lot of factors that scream some kind of fusion genre. Because of that, I think it's a very good introduction to extreme doom, and the band themselves. - Metal Archives 5/4
